Recently I read The Orientalist by Tom Reiss, a fascinating account of the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew from Baku who after the Russian revolution escaped via Turkey to Berlin. Semi-safely ensconced in the Weimar capital, he converted to Islam, taking the name "Essad Bey". A career writing bestselling biographies of Stalin and Mohammed followed. His escapades took him as far as Hollywood before he decided to return to Europe at precisely the wrong moment in history.

Trapped in Italy, he tried and failed to win the commission to write the official biography of Mussolini, a bold and bizarre move for an ethnic Jew. Unsurprisingly that plan didn't work out, so towards the end of his career he took another name, "Kurban Said", and wrote his first novel (and one true classic) Ali and Nino, a tale of love between a Christian and a Muslim in old Azerbaijan. Then he died in agony from a rare blood disease.

Or did he? Well, he definitely died. The question is – did Lev Nussimbaum actually write Ali and Nino? For several decades in the 20th century, nobody remembered who wrote it. Then, when the book was re-published in English in the late 1990s, the heirs of an Austrian baroness argued that she was the co-author with Nussimbaum/Bey, although Reiss does a good job of demolishing this claim, arguing that she was only listed as author to assist Nussimbaum/Bey in collecting royalties since, as a Jew, he could not publish in the Nazi empire.

Over in Azerbaijan, meanwhile, Ali and Nino is revered as the national novel and the fact that it was written in German by a Jewish convert to Islam is seen as, well, problematic. Thus if you visit the book's Wikipedia page you will see that some very helpful people have 1) declined to mention Reiss's book even though it was a bestseller in several countries, 2) indulged in some character assassination aimed at Nussimbaum (which is nothing compared to the muck flung at him on his biographical entry), and 3) advanced the thesis that the "core author" is the "Azerbaijani writer and statesman" Yusif Vazir Chamanzaminli, apparently on the basis of DEEP textual analysis, although they admit that Essad Bey's "fingerprints" are on the book – yucky!

Of course, the refusal to name Reiss's book on the Ali and Nino Wiki page is indicative of the extreme insecurity the invisible editors have regarding their claims. And this set me to wondering: how many other authors have disappeared behind their pseudonyms? And does the absence of clear authorship always cause anxiety?

The first book I thought about is another product of the Russian emigration: M Ageyev's mediocre drug "classic", Novel with Cocaine, about a Russian who does a lot of coke back in the interim period between Queen Victoria doing coke and lots of Hollywood types doing coke, when relatively few people were doing coke. Anyway, since the pseudonymous Ageyev's book emerged from the Berlin émigré scene, there was for a while speculation that Vladimir Nabokov was the author, although Nabokov himself described it as "decadent" and "disgusting" – and this in the days before those words were regularly interpreted as "edgy" and "bloody brilliant".

Before writing this piece I checked Wikipedia and discovered that some more invisible editors had laid the mystery to rest, pinpointing as the true author a gentleman named Mark Lazarevich Levi, who apparently died in Yerevan in 1973. If you can read Russian, you will see that this claim is not itself without controversy. Also, since almost nothing is known about the deceased Mr Levi it is not exactly helpful to know that a cipher may have written a pseudonymous book.

Then I remembered the astounding Asian Odyssey, written by yet another member of the Russian emigration, Dmitri Alioshin. The book is a memoir of Alioshin's days as a member of the anti-Bolshevik White Guard, and is remembered mainly for its portrait of the legendary White general, Baron Ungern Von Sterberg, a convert to Buddhism who dreamed of re-establishing Genghis Khan's empire via the application of extreme violence. Alioshin disappeared after the first world war, and since his publisher's records were destroyed by a bomb, it is unknown what became of him, or whether in fact that was his real name.

In the examples above, the identities behind these pseudonyms were obscured by traumatic events of the 20th century. But the more I reflected upon authors disappearing behind fake names, or simply not revealing themselves at all, the more I realised that this obscurity is actually central to western literature. At the root of our literature is the Bible – an anthology of sacred texts written by men whose names are unknown; and "Homer", who may have been a woman, two people, several people, and probably wasn't called Homer. Authors and thinkers such as Thomas Malthus and Walter Scott did not sign their names to their early books; even "Shakespeare" is a mask in the minds of heated conspiracy theorists (many of them Russian) who believe the true author was Francis Bacon, or whomever.

Back when I was student I was introduced to a very slim essay by Roland Barthes entitled The Death of the Author. Even as a beardless boy I knew that the thesis was half-baked, and noted that it was honoured only in theory and never in practice by its proponents. In fact, these days when an author disappears it inspires in certain souls a mad detective hunt. Bitter wars erupt between scholars, and tremendous amounts of creative energy are wasted on quixotic pursuits of the author's "true identity". Well, it's nice to have a hobby. Fortunately the rest of us can just enjoy the books.